Supreme Court refuses to transfer case from Madras High Court

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to transfer to itself the petitions filed by 17 ousted Dinakaran camp MLAs, for hearing the ‘disqualification case’. But it assigned the case to Justice M. Satyanarayanan in the Madras high court following a split verdict on their plea challenging the Speaker’s decision.

While the Chief Justice Indira Banerjee upheld the Tamil Nadu Speaker’s order disqualifying 18 MLAs, Justice Sundar set aside the Speaker’s order following which the matter was assigned to Justice S. Vimala.

Acting on the appeals, a vacation Bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Sanjay Kishan Kaul passed this order after hearing senior counsel Vikas Singh for the ousted MLAs and senior counsel C.S. Vaidyanathan and Ariyama Sundaram for the Chief Minister Edapaddi Palanichami and others.

Mr Vikas Singh pleaded for transfer of the case pointing out that there was a delay in pronouncement of the judgment. When the Bench took exception to the insinuations made by the counsel against Madras HC judges, counsel agreed to withdraw the allegations. Mr Vaidyanathan and Mr Sundaram also opposed the submissions of Mr Vikas Singh against judges. They said there was no reason for transfer of the matter to the apex court when the third judge had already been appointed.

In its order the Bench said, “At the outset, we record our appreciation of the fact that all the insinuations made against the judges including the third judge nominated have been unconditionally withdrawn by the petitioners. The remarks/insinuations stand expunged, including qua the assignment of the case to a particular judge by the first judge of the Court.”

It said “In the circumstances, as agreement has been expressed to appoint any judge of the Madras high court, we consider it appropriate to assign the case, to hear the matter on the differences of opinion between two judges, Chief Justice and other judge of the high court to Hon’ble Mr Justice M. Sathyanarayanan who will hear the matter and take a decision as early as possible. We make it clear that this casts no aspersion on the judge who had been appointed to hear the matter merely because we have appointed another judge of the high court of Madras.”

In their petitions P. Vetrivel and 16 others (one disqualified MLA Thanga Tamil Selvan did not prefer an appeal) said the present Transfer Petition arising out of an order passed by the Tamil Nadu Speaker on Sept. 18, 2017 disqualifying 18 MLAs raised several questions of general public importance and some of them are also pending before this Court for consideration.

They alleged that the Speaker had acted malafidely while passing an order on September 18, 2017 while at the same he had not even issued notice on the disqualification petition filed against 11 other MLAs of O. Panneerselvam camp in March 2017, when they voted against the motion of confidence taken out by Chief Minister  Palaniswami.

Furthermore, the petitioners have a reasonable apprehension of not having fair hearing in the State of Tamil because of the fact the respondents are very influential and are the incumbent Chief Minister and one of the affected party is the Deputy Chief Minister. In any event, even if the matter is finally decide in the High Court, this Court at the behest of the aggrieved party will subject it to further scrutiny. Hence, by transferring the writ petition and finally deciding the issues involved this Court can put to rest all the issues.

The petitioners also submitted this is a fit case for transfer of the petition, especially in view of the delay that is caused in deciding the present matter for over 10 months, due to which the constituencies of these MLAs has been suffering for almost a year now. This has also to be seen that when the Constitutional mandate is that if a seat falls vacant, Election Commission has to conduct election within a period of 6 months, the reason being that a constituency cannot be left without an elected representative for so long. Projects are stuck for lack of approval in these constituencies, they submitted.